Bloody Picnic: Tommy's Humour, 1914-18

By Alan Weeks

One of the crucial factors which kept Tommy going on the Western Front was his facility to see what was comic in the horror, deprivation and discomfort of trench warfare, an attitude which blossomed further in the rest areas behind the lines. The nature of the comedy ranged from gentle irony to a rougher hilarity that produced on belly laughs. Such laughter could arise from extreme physical pain and discomfort, from the provision of sustenance and from matters relating to dress, equipment and weapons. A further source of fun was bizarre events not dissimilar to situation comedy and pantomime. Moreover, a whole culture of humor surrounded Tommy's words and songs, and many trench pets—cats, dogs, horses, goats, even rats—were in on the joke in one way or another. Nor was it only the British soldiers who managed to find something to laugh about in the trenches—the Germans could sometimes see the funny side as well. A Bloody Picnic provides an unusual perspective on how soliders coped with the grim realities of the First World War.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Dec 26, 2010
• ISBN: 9780752462585

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Copyright

ONE

Do you Suffer From Cheerfulness?

Cheerful on the Somme

When the horrific Battle of the Somme had been raging for a month, the trench journal The Somme Times, of 31 July 1916, posed the question: ‘Do you suffer from cheerfulness?’

Private Hudson, a veteran of the Lancashire Regiment, appeared to have this painful condition. Whilst on sentry duty, looking over the trench parapet during this fateful month of July 1916, Hudson was struck on the leg by a shell splinter but remained serenely at his post and even started to sing: 

Ai love the ladies,

Ai love to be amongst the girls.

Not many days later a gas shell hit the parapet a few inches from Corporal Baker’s head. ‘Give me a proper ’eadache that ’as, sir, give you me word on it, sir,’ he commented breezily to Captain Charles Edmonds.

Not far away on the same day, ‘Spider’ Webb from Stepney was standing with two chums on the duckboards at the bottom of their trench when a shell landed at their feet. Spider’s comrades were killed instantly and one of his legs was blown away from the knee. ‘What’s happened, Webb?’ called an officer frantically.

Now Private Webb was a good cricketer. ‘Blimey, what’s happened, sir,’ he responded cheerfully, ‘is one over, two bowled.’ Then he glanced down at the mess where he once had a leg. ‘And I’m stumped, sir.’ Only then did he collapse into a faint.

Two ‘Leeds Pals’ (the 15th Battalion of the West Yorkshire Regiment, or 15/West Yorkshires) were among the 30–40,000 wounded on the first day of the Battle of the Somme (the ‘Black Day’ of the British Army during which another 20,000 or so were killed). At least these two were able to walk back to the field dressing station. They were directed to the ‘Elephant’, a round, corrugated structure.

‘Come on, Jack,’ said one, half-carrying his pal. ‘This way to the Elephant and Castle. They might even pull us a pint, mate.’

Jolly Officers

Cheerfulness was not confined to other ranks on that day (or any day). The commanding officer of the 1/Hampshires, mortally wounded and lying half-submerged at the bottom of a shell hole, offered advice to the private next to him, who could still move: ‘Well, if you knows of a better ’ole,’ he said, mimicking the caption on perhaps the most famous cartoon of the war (drawn by Captain Bruce Bairnsfather), ‘go to it.’

John Glubb (7th Field Company, Royal Engineers) recalled that during a severe enemy bombardment at Wancourt during the Battle of Arras (24 April 1917) an RE officer from another field company was desperately trying to get back to his own unit and was in grave danger in the open fields. He arrived breathlessly in Glubb’s ditch and asked if there was a regular interval between each explosion.

‘Three minutes,’ said Glubb.

So his visitor waited for the next crump and then prepared to make a headlong dash for it.

‘Well, tempus fugit, old boy, as the Chinaman say. Bye, bye,’ was his jolly parting shot.

Alfred McLelland Burrage of the Artists’ Rifles met a similar situation near Ytres during the massive German offensive of March 1918. He was in a sunken road and a platoon came scampering down a bank on to it, trying to take cover from a hail of shells. However, there was little similarity in the speech and demeanour of the officer compared to the one at Wancourt. He was shaking like a leaf and urinated in the road and passed wind vociferously from both ends.

‘Them bleedin’ shells don’t ’arf put the f***ing wind up me,’ he confessed to Burrage. He then issued orders to his men. ‘Git orf dahn this bleedin’ road in twos and threes. Let’s git aht of this bleedin’ place.’

So saying, he rapidly led the way up the road. He was, as Charles Edmonds would have described him, an example of the ‘urban soldier’, a typical Kitchener or New Army officer. These men, recruited as the old British Expeditionary Force (BEF) was decimated in 1914, came from many walks of life, very often holding positions of responsibility in civilian life – managers, supervisors, foremen, professional men, etc.

Edmonds served with a fellow subaltern whom he rated a perfect example of this urban soldier, possessing a ‘street arab’ sort of humour. This was Lieutenant Marriot, who maintained a flowing babble of silly little jokes and anecdotes unless he was asleep. He seized upon the slightest excuse to be amusing. It helped him to forget the open door of the dugout and what might come through it at any moment.

Captain Sidney Rogerson, travelling in a lorry to Amiens for a break in 1917, had only one companion, whom he called ‘B’. ‘B’ was gallant, floridly handsome, devil-may-care and a great womaniser. This officer’s ‘conversation’ during the journey consisted of a monologue about how drunk he was going to get in Amiens. ‘Solid ivory from the neck up’, was Rogerson’s verdict. But ‘B’ was undoubtedly cheerful if nothing much else.

Captain Tom Adlam (7/Beds and Herts), who was awarded a VC for his bravery during the Battle of the Somme, also kept up a steady stream of crude comments and dirty jokes and stories. ‘Who’s farted?’ was his catchphrase.

Trying to be Cheerful

Edmonds reckoned that cheerfulness reached ‘hysterical’ proportions as men were preparing to leave the comparative safety of the trench to venture into no-man’s-land, even just on night patrols. Trench ‘cheerfulness’, according to George Coppard (2/Queen’s Royal West Surreys, or just Queen’s for short), was not the same as the relaxed merriment of civilian life.

The soldiers tried to be cheerful in their letters home (more examples are shown in Chapter Ten), hoping to reassure their folks that they were ‘quite well’, as the official army postcards put it. These efforts may not always have been entirely successful, as you can see from the following example sent by a lance corporal in Robert Graves’ Company early in 1915:

Dear Auntie,

This leaves me in the pink. We are at present wading up to our necks in blood. Send me fags and a life-belt. This war is a booger, Love and kisses.

Published by kind permission of the family of Bert Thomas.

They didn’t laugh at anything. Graves noted that the rough-tough and habitually callous ex-Welsh coalminers of the 2/Royal Welch Fusiliers (or 2/RWF) saw nothing amusing in the spectacle of a comrade taking three hours to die after having the top part of his head blown off by a bullet fired from 20 metres away.

Indeed, persistent cheerfulness became more difficult as the war dragged on. Charles Carrington (alias Charles Edmonds) remarked that the inclination of officers in 1914, 1915 and 1916 to go ‘over the top’ (or ‘over the bags’ or ‘over the plonk’) into no-man’s-land kicking footballs (famously like Captain Billie Nevill on the first day of the Somme) or blowing horns, had evaporated by the end of 1916.

Tommy began to wonder if the war would go on forever – a depressing thought. A divisional follies show in 1917 featured a sketch entitled ‘The Trench 1950’. In it a fed-up Tommy and a fed-up Jerry stared at one another from their respective trenches separated by a no-man’s-land of about 6 feet. Major Pilditch recalled that he found this the most amusing entertainment he saw during the whole war.

Ironic

The humour could be powerfully ironic, and not only from officers or educated other ranks. The survivors of the 10/Durham Light Infantry (or 10/DLI ), reeling away from the dreadful Battle of Delville Wood, Somme (16 September 1916), had lost the majority of their comrades. As they staggered back to rest they were passed by a battalion who still had shiny buttons and some enthusiasm for the battle ahead. But catching sight of the Durhams wiped the smiles off their faces. ‘What’s it like up there, chum?’ one asked, somewhat anxiously.

‘A bloody picnic,’ came the grim reply. The Durhams trudged on.

Captain Julian Grenfell (1/Royal Dragoon Guards) was one of the small, original BEF which crossed the English Channel in August 1914, looking forward to the fun of teaching the Hun a painful lesson. ‘A picnic with a purpose’ was the way Grenfell looked at it. He belonged, like most of his fellow officers, to an Edwardian social class who enjoyed picnics. But it was doubtful whether any of the 10/DLI had ever supped an ‘Edwardian Champagne Cup’ at a country picnic. But at least one of them was a master of irony.

‘’Arf a Mo, Kaiser.’ – ‘’Arf a Mo’ was, in fact, a brand of fag which, according to many Tommies, tasted of seaweed. Drawing by Bert Thomas. Published by kind permission of the family of Bert Thomas.

There must have been many encounters like this one. On the ‘Black Day’ the South Staffordshires, having suffered catastrophic losses, were just as shabby, dirty, hollow-eyed and grime-streaked as the Durhams later at Delville Wood. A staff corporal had his version of the events of the day which he generously shared with passing units: ‘General F***-up was in command again!’ he informed them merrily.

Dislocation

Volunteer soldiers of working-class origin did not find it difficult to be disdainful about those who had sent them to this bloody war. Similar dislocation existed between officers and men who spent a lot of time on the front line and senior officers (‘Brass Hats’) who seldom appeared in it (also see Chapter Four).

Moreover, the real ‘Western Front’ often wondered if the ‘Home Front’ had any idea how horrific the front line was or whether they cared to know. Sarcasm reached new heights with this possibility. Early in 1915 a company commander of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders spent some leave in London. On his return to France he was quizzed by fellow officers about the main concerns in the capital. He reported that the overriding topic of conversation was the latest Charlie Chaplin film.

‘I was a bit anxious about things at home,’ reflected Major ‘Kemp’ (not his real name), the CO of this battalion, in response to this revelation. ‘But I see now there is nothing to worry about. It’s a great country. We shall win all right.’

Indeed, the advice from England to the boys on the front line at this stage of the war was ‘keep your heads up’. However, Private Bernard Livermore (2/20 Londons), known popularly as ‘Long ’Un’, was constantly advised in the trenches to ‘keep his head down’. All a German sniper needed was a four-second view of a potential victim.

In the Livermore case, a visiting (briefly) brigadier commented to the Londoner’s CO: ‘Man’s too tall for the trench.’ But Bernard’s rosy vision of a cushy job at Brigade HQ never materialised. Moreover, he didn’t even get the false teeth he had been promised to replace those molars knocked out by Huntley & Palmer’s No 4 ‘dog biscuits’, one of the mainstays of Tommy’s diet.

Help from Home

Of course, families and friends in Britain were terrified at the prospect of their loved ones being killed or wounded. Londoners turned out in their thousands to greet the hospital trains coming into Waterloo and Victoria, and threw flowers over their heroes. Millions of parcels were dispatched across the Channel to France and Flanders. Helpful ideas flowed across, too. Andrew Clark, Rector of Great Leighs in Essex, wrote to Lord Kitchener (26 January 1915) proposing the use of fishing tackle to send messages from the support trenches to the front trenches. Bigger and stouter reels and rods could be used to bring up supplies from the dumps. Kitchener’s office thanked Clark for his contribution to the war effort.

Horatio Bottomley, a well-known journalist, visited the Gavrelle front near Arras in September 1917, in preparation for one of his propaganda articles – ‘Somewhere in Hell: What I have seen. What I have done.’ This was some event: war correspondents in the trenches were rarer than generals and there had been calls for a new military medal – ‘For Distinguished Lying off the Field’.

On hearing of Bottomley’s imminent presence, the cinema sergeant of the 15th Highland Division asked Colonel Nicholson if he should ‘Get my gun, if I can find it’. Gavrelle Switch was 4,000 yards behind the front line and never under fire.

‘Stand on the fire step, Mr Bottomley, and you will see,’ invited the colonel, but the little man crouched nervously down in the bottom of the trench. However, he managed to raise himself a little for the official photographs, demanding that the caption for them indicate that they were taken a hundred yards from the enemy. They put him in a gas mask for one of the pictures and Colonel Nicholson was hoping that the little brute would suffocate (see illustration).

Horatio Bottomley, the journalist, tries on a gas mask.

The Mudhook, the Royal Naval Division trench newspaper, celebrated Bottomley’s visit and subsequent article, and suggested that they would inspire the troops to even greater efforts. In the meantime, The Mudhook wondered what steps were being taken to ameliorate the hacking coughs of our gallant soldiers. Brigadiers were sitting huddled over some distant fires drinking bottles of wine to soothe their lacerated throats. Young officers with a passion for oatmeal biscuits were being denied this delight. Bottomley was beseeched to send cough drops to alleviate all this suffering.

Bottomley was at work again in the John Bull magazine in November 1917, at a time when the Battle of Passchendaele (or Third Ypres) had more or less ground to a halt in the thick Flanders mud. His article was called ‘Non-stop to Berlin’, another supreme example of his journalistic craft.

The officers of the 2/West Yorkshires at Citadel Camp had just digested Bottomley’s latest offering when orders from Divisional HQ listed extra items to be carried up to the front by all men. Tommy already resembled a ‘Christmas tree’ when stumbling in the slime up dark communication trenches. Now, in addition to the existing heavy load, he had to lug as many trench boards as possible, plus extra picks, shovels, wire and screw pickets, and a large bottle of whale oil for their feet – apparently, according to Horatio Bottomley, all the way to Berlin.

In 1922 Horatio Bottomley, MP was imprisoned for fraud in connection with post-war Victory Bonds.

There were other interesting publications in John Bull. In 1916, before the Battle of the Somme, it predicted rapid and total victory. As a result, in 1917, with no end of the war in sight, there was a popular poem which went round the trenches:

We always keep our copies by

And that is why we prophesy,

The war was over last July,

It said so in John Bull.

Cuckoos Along the Menin Road

But wartime irony reached its most sublime levels in probably the most famous trench journal, The Wipers Times (and its various successors). The editors of this classic satire were Captain (later Lieutenant-Colonel) F.J. (‘Fred’) Roberts and Lieutenant (later Major) J.H. Pearson. They wrote or stage-managed irony of quality, based on dislocation with the Home Front, often expressed, when you consider the precarious situation these officers and their comrades found themselves in, via a painful but very comic nostalgia for home (there is more Wipers Times in Chapter Three).

In the first issue (12 February 1916), a ‘correspondent’ signing himself as ‘A Lover of Nature’ claimed to have heard the first cuckoo of spring along the Menin Road. This well-known thoroughfare ran east out of Ypres and had been the focus of two prolonged and fierce battles in 1914 and 1915, and would be at the centre of an even larger and bloodier confrontation in 1917.

In the second issue of the journal (26 February 1916), ‘One Who Knows’ disputed the claim made by ‘A Lover of Nature’. ‘One Who Knows’ had heard a cuckoo along the Menin Road at least two days before ‘A Lover of Nature’. He went on to accuse ‘A Lover of Nature’ of knowing nothing about ‘Nature’. What this twerp had heard in all probability along the Menin Road was a sniper calling to its mate.

The conflict broadened. On 6 March ‘A Lover of Nature’ hit back at the slurs on his reputation from this ‘scurrilous, lying effusion’ called ‘One Who Knows’. He resented this other’s claim to be the first in 1916 to hear the cuckoo along the Menin Road.

Another ‘correspondent’ – ‘A Nocturnal Prowler’ – joined in by asserting that he had heard a nightingale along the Menin Road, but yet another – ‘Fed-up’ – ended this vituperous exchange by condemning the waste of valuable space taken up by the cuckoo (and the nightingale) in such a renowned journal. Actually, Captain Roger Pocock of the 178 Labour Company did hear the song of a skylark one night at the time of year when this was impossible, at least, according to ‘Nature’. Staring into the gloom he discerned one of his men perched on top of a wagon imitating the bird. He could also do crows and tits.

What Were They Laughing At?

In October 1917 the 16/Sherwood Foresters were wallowing in a vast expanse of liquid mud in the Passchendaele battlefield near Kitchener Wood. The ground was totally pitted with shell holes and they were filled with water to varying depths. The trick, in order to move forwards or backwards, was to ascertain the depth of the water in front of you or behind. If you lost your footing you were in trouble.

The padre of the Foresters had stayed with them throughout the battle. He was the Rev. John Bloxam and it was he who fell headlong into the water. Fortunately, it was only a couple of feet deep and so the Foresters scrambled down to get him out. But, try as hard as they could, these brawny men could not shift Bloxam out of the morass. He was completely wedged in